The electoral council announced this morning that Chavez had 58% of the votes.

I can say, while being objective, that this is simply not true. The goverment played its card, requiring voters to use a special machine which captures fingerprints, which failed most of the time (it even failed on the president himself).

Lines were long, and i mean LONG. People got up at 3am and most didn't leave up to 3pm. I myself waited until it was 7:30pm to go and only had to be 3 hours in line.

This results ARE NOT LEGIT. I have proof myself. I own several scanner radios, where i could heard the fraud going on.

They were bringing people from across the colombian border. There were talking about voting twice (don't know how, since we get inked at the end of the voting), although all electoral members were put by the goverment, figure how!

Thy bet we would get out of the lines due to the sun and getting tired. Maybe some did, but i tell you lot of people didn't.

People who had voted, went to the stores and bought food and drinks for the people in line. Talk about union in the voters. Feeding completely strangers. That's who we venezuelans are.

Via "exit polls" people were knowing the results. Opposition said they had 58% while goverment said they had 65%.

No one of the international observers (OAS, Carter Center) have announced anything. There were reports of the electronic machines changing votes. There is a rumor that a YES vote counted as a YES AND NO vote.

So, i say fraud. Unexpected? Hell no.

UPDATE 8/17: The opposition has proved that the electronic machines had a maximum ceiling vote for the YES option, making any vote for that option beyond that fixed number have an unknown destination

The recall election is this sunday. If people give more than 3.7 million votes against Chavez (and if they are more than the votes of people wanting to keep him) then Chavez gets kicked and leaves power to the vicepresident.

The irony in this, that there is nothing in the constitution that wouldn't allow him to be a candidate in the election for president 30 days later.

So can he win? Certainly. He has given citizenship to about 2 million people. Will all of them vote for him? Only time will tell.

What about the election system? The election will be automatic, only manual vote will be used in rural places or if there is a problem. I have seen the specs on the technology, and it seems way better than Diebold machines.

This is what i remember. You enter your fingerprint in a machine, and it will tell you if you have voted so you can't vote twice. Then you are checked to see if you are allowed to vote (registered, etc) and then on the next machine you get a question and 2 choices:

"Are you OK to end Chavez's job as current president of Venezuela?" Rough translation.

NO YES (in that order)

After you choose, you confirm, and a small receipt gets printed, which you insert into a box.

Chavez could win. He has the control of the entire goverment, the electoral council, the supreme court. But also, sunday's vote will be private, instead of the signatures to request the recall. That may be the deciding factor on sunday.

According to Constitution, if 20% of the voters sign a petition, there must be general elections that decide if the president stays in power after half of the term.

The goverment is trying everything it can to impede this. A month ago, the national electoral council dismissed the signatures people made because they were "old" (i.e, collected before the half of the term)

If the country doesn't get the referendum elections, this country may go to a civil war. Although it could happen the same if:

In my first journal, someone asked what i thought about the U.S funding the april 11th coup in my country.

Some months ago, i was browsing Stallman's site and i was mad. He was defending my president (which he does not know) because he said the U.S had funded the coup, cheated on the Florida elections, etc etc.

Anyway, for those of you that have some credible information, comments are welcome.

I have been on the internet since about 1994, when in my state didn't have internet access and the only way was through the local university. A different university had a satellite dish and we had a connection to that university.

Only relatives of professors of our local university had access (though we found our way in, by borrowing accounts)

The access was at 2400 baud, and it was done via telnet. Later it was upgraded to 9600 baud and you could do some graphic browsing via a browser i can't remember its name.

In text mode, you had to send mail to a ftpmail server in order to be able to download a file. I remember i asked for the 2 patchs that were available for Doom ][

Later in 1995, Compuserve came to town (i live in Maracaibo, Venezuela, South America) and it was really slow and difficult to connect. My dad was foolishly scammed by a member and his credit card was stolen.

Later we got an ISP. 28.8kbaud. Fast foward 1997, and i had my own connection, 56k, 5 minutes a day. It growed to an hour a day, and with programs like wingate i could share the connection between my dad and me.

Since december 2000, we have adsl 256kkbits/64kbits. And about from that time, i have a ritual every day of a list of sites i visit. Currently those are, in order:-Newsforge-Betanews-Mandrake.com-Mandrakeforum.com-Pclinuxonline.com-Slipstreamx.net-Neowin.net-Slashdot.org

My experience on/. hasn't been really positive. I started as anonymous, then opened an account (i wanted espectro but the letter o was taken). I would find out that every comment i made wasn't read because i posted some hours after the article. Even being a registered user, i was getting all 0 points post. A flaw in the slash code maybe?

I asked taco about it. This is no troll, but i think he either was wasted or he is completely stupid when in email mode. I asked him why all i get would be 0 points posts. He just answered in one line: "post"

I mean WTF is that? Even for a long time, i would not get moderated, either up or down. Not surpringsinly, after about 1-2 weeks after i emailed taco, i would start getting the default 1 point posts, and on my way to finally getting karma: neutral.

Now, i finally got 2 good posts, one modded +3, the other +4, so my karma is positive now.

My only other gripe, is news submission. I have submitted 7 of them, none have been approved. Even one of those 7 was posted about a week later than the date i submitted it.

So, that is my currently experience on/.My specs: i have 2 pc in my room, a compaq amd 333 64mb laptop that i use the most, with mostly winxp sp1 and vector linux 2.5, and my main amd 2100 xp 256mb ram which has gentoo, winxp and win98

I am 21 and studying computer science down here in the local university.

Probably no one will ever read this, so why bother? I was just bored. Hope you are bored too so you can read this:)